Tomorrow's Dawn (Book 3): Escape and Evade Read online

  Jensen carefully broke the rifle down, hoping the internals would be similar to those in his Adams Arms. The bolt carrier group would have been extraordinarily useful, but he had left his rifle resting by Sheila’s body. In his hurry to leave, he’d remembered to pick up Daniel’s weapon, but not his own. He’d been looking at Daniel as he moved and focused on retrieving his rifle for him. Stupid.

  Unfortunately, the carrier group in the SIG was much different than that found in a typical AR rifle. It was short and blocky rather than long and thin. It wouldn’t do much good. He reassembled the rifle, he hoped correctly, and set it back down. He didn’t know the gas tube, which directed gasses into the short stroke piston, could be easily removed from the front and would have made a great tool.

  Instead, he reached for his Ruger American and disassembled it. The 4.2” barrel would have to do. He turned back to the hatch and started scraping at the bank. It didn’t extend his reach much, but the metal tube was far more effective for working the soil loose than his awkwardly twisted fingers had been.

  Mentally, he apologized to his pistol for treating it so badly. After his years in the military, he shuddered at the thought of a dirty weapon. Here he was intentionally jamming the barrel into the dirt. Jensen tried to keep his back relaxed as much as possible as he dug while keeping a tight grip on the barrel. It was like trying to rub your belly and pat your head at the same time; doable, but took focus.

  While he dug, his mind kept flashing back to Billy, who had died while trapped inside the cockpit of another tub. They had been designed to keep the occupants safe and prevent entry, not to be easy to get out of with a giant tree on top of the cockpit. Jensen pulled his hand back in to give his back a rest and shook out his hand.

  He had begun to lose feeling in it because the narrow gap of the hatch was cutting off some of the blood supply to his hand. That could be very bad.

  Jensen reasoned with himself. “Take your time. Don’t screw this up.” He was worried that some of the Senator’s men could be on their way right now, or another drone could be en route to end his life.

  He also knew, even if he got the hatch open enough for him to squeeze through, he’d still have to clear a way through the dirt of the bank in order to escape. It seemed like a herculean task using only the metal barrel. It could take him days. He probably didn’t have days. He didn’t have water in the cockpit with him, and without the cooling system, the small area would begin to heat up very quickly.

  While he waited, Jensen tried everything he could think of to reset the power on his rig. There was a breaker box under his seat; all of them were tripped. He flipped each one off and then on again several times as he tried to start up the computers again. Nothing responded. The EMP from the blast had completely fried his vehicle. It wasn’t going to move again without a complete overhaul.

  Even the grenade launcher was electronic. He couldn’t swivel the turret or fire it without the computers online. It wasn’t accessible from inside the cockpit. It rested outside the titanium tub and could have been miles away for all the good it would do him.

  No power, no water, no cooling, very little hope. Jensen was resting in a beautiful modern titanium coffin, trapped by primordial nature. He turned back toward the hatch and started digging again.

  Chapter 7

  The quiet control room was nice. As a Senator, Bobby Snead usually had some sort of lackey or lobbyist hounding him. Not today. Today he was alone with his thoughts. He hated the idea of destroying part of his state with those nuclear blasts, but he couldn’t take the chance that someone would be able to trace the activities at North Georgia Technical College back to him.

  He’d started preparing the site at NGTC years before by starting a free program for locals who needed medical care. With no athletic program, the school was more than willing to give up the space, especially when he gave them generous donations to help fund the small medical program on campus. Bobby had used his contacts at the Center for Disease Control to set up a partnership between NGTC and the CDC.

  Bobby’s father had been the Chief Epidemiologist at the CDC before he died mysteriously. One day he’d left the office and gone missing. His body was found three weeks later washed up on the Alabama shoreline south of Mobile. It was investigated as a homicide, but with the decayed state of the corpse and no real leads, the investigation led nowhere.

  He’d been the first man Bobby had killed. He didn’t hate him, but his father had hinted he was going to stop financing Bobby’s political aspirations, and he’d had a large life insurance policy as a result of his dangerous work in the government. The windfall payment had allowed Bobby to campaign for a state senate seat, and the news coverage surrounding his father’s death had gotten him more name recognition than he could have imagined.

  It was enough to get him elected to a seat in Georgia’s 6th district. From there, he managed to augment his salary though shrewd negotiations with Atlanta’s leading businessmen. They contributed to his campaign funds, and he made sure they were well taken care of. He’d even gotten a box seat to watch the Falcons play at Mercedes-Benz stadium.

  Once in place, Bobby became known as a staunch conservative. He led bills to make homosexuality illegal and make divorce more difficult. Both failed. His campaign ads focused on family values and following God’s rules. That played very well in rural parts of Georgia, but ruffled some feathers in the more liberal Atlanta area.

  He barely succeeded in winning a second term, and that was only because some of the ballots simply weren’t counted. Anything is possible when you’ve got the money and influence to make it happen. Between the election and the recount, those ballots disappeared. He won by 351 votes.

  It was enough to convince him he needed to campaign for a national seat. His ideals sold better across the state than they did in Atlanta, which was far more progressive than much of the southeast. It helped that he’d dug up information on an illicit affair between Jeb Daniels, the incumbent, and a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. Daniels had withdrawn from the race just before the election.

  As a Senator, he’d sided far more frequently with the Republicans than the Democrats, and had even privately considered joining the party. However, his status as an independent meant he could keep some distance between their platform and his campaigns. God and country. It was at the end of every one of his commercials, which were paid for by a political activist group called Americans For a Better Future.

  One reporter who’d investigated the shadow group had disappeared suddenly. He’d been the second man Snead had ever killed. His body would probably never be found, because Bobby had dumped it during a chartered fishing expedition several miles off the Maine coastline.

  God and country. It wasn’t just a campaign slogan; Bobby really believed it. God was looking down at his country and judging the wanton homosexuality and adultery. The filth on television was immoral and atheists were steadily waging war against God. They’d even gone so far as to bring a lawsuit against the government to remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from the official currency.

  Senator Snead introduced bill after bill to bring order back to the land. None of them made it to the floor. He voted his conscience on social issues, but was almost always on the losing side. He did everything in his power, but he met roadblocks at every turn. Senior senators took him aside and tried to explain how things worked, how some sacrifices had to be made in order to push other bills through.

  He realized early on that most of the conservatives were in the old south and the Midwest. The northerners and west coast were a bunch of socialists throwing money at the lower classes to buy their votes. It made him smile to think of those cities glowing in the dark for decades to come. The nukes from Russia and China had done exactly what he wanted—take out the population centers.

  The righteous people out in the country, in his south, would lead a new revolution and a return to family values and good morals. He’d make certain of it.

 
; Chapter 8

  Jensen’s stomach was rumbling in the early afternoon sun. He hadn’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours, and his body was letting him know. He was also regularly hearing from his back, his shoulders, his forearms, and his hands, which were all aching from his attempts to dig himself out of the tub. He’d succeeded in opening the door a couple inches further, which helped, but he had so far to go.

  Even worse, he stunk. The sun was shining directly on his closed canopy. The trees that would normally shade the area were lying on the ground, and on his tub. There was no airflow through tight cabin because he couldn’t get the hatches open far enough. His clothes were saturated with sweat and it hurt to move.

  Through the commander’s side hatch, he could see a small creek running along the road less than a hundred yards away. At the moment, he’d give just about anything to sink down into the chilled waters to wash the stink off his body and out of his clothes. Even better would be a heavy thunderstorm. It would cool things off and the rain might help eat away at the earthen bank trapping him inside the vehicle.

  While he was asking for miracles, he’d also like an Italian beef sandwich with hot giardiniera. And a pizza. Not just a slice, a whole fucking pizza. And some cold beer to wash it all down. Instead, he had an afternoon sauna sucking the moisture out of his body. His wrist hurt like hell from twisting it to try digging into the hard-packed earth outside the hatch. He really needed to cool off some or he’d die of dehydration before he got the hatch open far enough to get out.

  Jensen stopped massaging his wrist and reached down to untie his boots. He kicked them off and peeled off his socks. That might have been a mistake, because his boots smelled like mildew and a boy’s locker room after a football game. He followed that with his trousers and his shirt, which he laid out on the driver’s seat to air out.

  He was down to just his boxer briefs, with his offending clothes on the other side of the tub. He didn’t smell any better, but at least he was slightly cooler. Jensen glared balefully at the clear sky. He’d heard somewhere Rabun was the rainiest county in Georgia. It couldn’t even offer up one good cloud to block the sun? He stopped massaging his wrist again to flip a middle finger up at the offending sky.

  This was some bullshit. He turned back to the hatch, as much to catch some fresh air as to keep digging.

  It was several hours later, with the sun high in the sky, when his fingers let go of the pistol barrel and Jensen slid into unconsciousness. The heat in the small cockpit finally overwhelmed him as the temperature continued to climb. His back was already red with sunburn as he slumped forward. The canopy glass had been acting almost like a greenhouse roof, blasting his skin with solar radiation and heating the interior of the tub far above the temperature of the surrounding air.

  The barrel dropped outside the tub and disappeared into the pile of dirt which had fallen as he chipped it out of the embankment. The ramp at the end of the barrel was the only piece visible, but it was too far away for Jensen to reach, even if he was capable of doing so.

  Chapter 9

  “Hey, there’s his tank!” Jessica pointed excitedly at the nose of Jensen’s tub, which was pinned beneath a large tree. She hurried forward through the fallen branches toward the vehicle with the others behind her. As she grew closer, she saw the hatch wedged shut by a huge tree branch.

  She called out. “Jensen! Jensen! Are you in there?” as she got closer. When she received no reply, she pulled herself up on the branch and peered inside. Her heart started to hammer when she saw his still body lying across the passenger seat. She pounded on the glass and called out his name again, but he didn’t move.

  “Daniel! We have to get him out of here!” The big man bent under the tree branch and strained with all his might but couldn’t shift it. Nate joined him, but the tree weighed thousands of pounds, and it didn’t move at all. “Maybe try pushing the tank back?” Jessica asked.

  Daniel nodded as he tried to catch his breath from the exertion. “We can give that a try.”

  He ducked under the tree trunk and put his back to the front of the tub. Nate, Marcy, and Rob joined him along the leading edge of the vehicle, while Brent went to the partially open hatch and grabbed the sill. There wasn’t enough room for all five of them in the front.

  “On the count of three, one…two…three!” They strained mightily to move the heavy vehicle back, but only succeeded in losing their footing in the debris. Daniel fell heavily to the ground. “Ouch. Ouch, ouch, fucking ouch. That hurts.” He put a hand to his head, “Not cool.”

  Brent carefully looked at the tub, which was wedged between the embankment and the tree. “I don’t know if the wheels are locked up or if there’s just too much friction, but this thing isn’t moving.”

  Jessica looked to her left at where Jensen had been gouging out bits of dirt. “He was trying to dig out on this side.” She scrambled over and tried to push at the dirt with her hands, but it did nothing. “It’s really packed, we need a shovel or something.”

  Rob came to the rescue. The slender man recalled seeing a fire station about half a mile behind them. “I can check it out. They must have hand tools there.” Without waiting for a response, he started jogging back the way they’d come.

  Moments later, Nate said, “I’ll go with him,” and followed.

  He quickly fell behind as Rob seemed to melt through the trees. He didn’t fit through the same gaps as the smaller man and struggled to find ways over and under the fallen logs.

  As soon as they were out of earshot, Marcy turned to Brent, “So I still don’t understand what’s going on with them. What’s the deal?”

  Brent shrugged. “They’re on our side now. Jensen said they checked out.”

  Marcy looked confused. “But weren’t they trying to kill us?”

  Brent nodded in response. “Yeah, but that was this morning. Now they’re not.” He picked up a broken tree branch and headed back toward the tub. “At least I hope so.”

  He started slamming the jagged end of the broken branch into the hard soil, hoping to make some headway while Nate and Rob were gone. Brent tried to avoid looking at Jensen’s sun-baked body as he dug. It was hard to tell if he was alive or dead, but he could see his back rising and falling slightly as he breathed. He knew Jensen was alive, but he didn’t know for how much longer.

  About five minutes passed before they heard gunshots off to the west, in the direction the two Vampirgruppe soldiers had gone. Two quick shots in succession, then a third moments later. Brent dropped the branch and swung his rifle up, pointed in that direction. He watched as Daniel took partial cover against the tub while Jessica mimicked his actions with her own rifle. She remained on top of the tub for a better view.

  He asked, to nobody in particular, “Want to check it out?”

  Jessica shook her head. “I’m staying here. You can go if you want to.”

  Brent looked at the meager progress he’d made with the branch. “We need tools. I’ll go.”

  He looked at the road and then chose to scramble down the bank instead. The road curved around in the direction of the firehouse, so he would go straight across. Hopefully whoever was shooting wouldn’t be looking that way.

  Jessica watched from high on the tub as he carefully made his way through the fallen trees. Her eyes darted between the road, Brent’s path, and Jensen’s still body. They lingered on the last sight more than the others, hoping each time to see his back rising and falling slightly as he breathed. Then a thought occurred to her. “Daniel, break of some of those branches for me. We need to give him some shade.”

  He thought to himself, Yeah, let’s pile more trees on the poor guy. He’s going to be seriously disturbed when he wakes up and finds even more branches on him. He snorted. There was something wrong with him. Who thinks things like that?

  As he gathered branches from trees and bushes, he started to worry. Who was responsible for those gunshots? How were they going to get Jensen free of the tub? Were Snead’s men going
to come back for them? He looked down at his arms and worried about something else. Where was he going to get lotion? His elbows were looking ashy. He hoped it wasn’t radiation from the bomb. He peered more closely. Nope, just regular ashy skin. He hoped.

  “Daniel! Stop fucking around and bring me the branches. They’re not doing Jensen any good over there.”

  The big man snapped out of his reverie and brought his collection of branches to Jessica. He handed them to her one by one as she carefully placed them over the canopy to provide some shade for Jensen.

  She desperately hoped they would get him out of there soon. She didn’t know how long he’d been like that or if he’d suffered any permanent damage. His stillness scared the hell out of her. She’d seen him take on armored vehicles and machine guns. He’d seemed indestructible. Now he was unconscious and mostly naked, trapped inside an armored vehicle.

  Jess looked in Brent’s direction, silently urging him to hurry. At the rate he was going, it would take him an hour to cover the short distance to the fire station. She didn’t want him to walk into an ambush, but her panic about Jensen’s condition seemed to increase with every passing moment. As he moved out of sight she listened intently for more gunshots.

  She caught herself. They wouldn’t be hard to hear at that distance. She was just overcome with a sort of panic at the moment and was filled with nervous energy. She just wanted to scream.

  What the hell was happening to them? She thought of Sheila, and her nervous energy turned to tears. She didn’t break down, but tears streamed from her eyes and dripped upon the canopy over Jensen’s still body.

  Chapter 10

  Rob stood over Nate’s body in the office of the fire station. Nate had been trying to use the radio to call back to their headquarters. Rob had just reacted. The place didn’t even have power. They were too far away for a radio transmission to reach their base back in Americus. He’d reacted and now Nate was gone.